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Introduction

Within technologies for the safe use of interconnected computer systems, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) represent a segment with a remarkable development both from the commercial (both in the private sector and the public administration) and the technological side, where we see significant investments by vendors and system integrators. All these involve rapid and interesting innovations in the proliferation of advanced services by specialized operators and, in general, in the growth of this sector.

A VPN (Connolly, 2002; Golen, 2002; Tyson, 2008) enables you to separate different types of traffic and implement secure private connections across public networks through labeling techniques, tunneling and traffic encryption (Browne, 2001; Cisco Systems, 1999). VPNs are an effective and safe way to extend services, applications and enterprise networks, beyond the physical boundaries of individual organizations by transparently supporting the innovative services of today’s network infrastructures. Development supported by the investments from the main protagonists of networking (satisfying functionality, manageability, scalability, and security) has led to a gradual improvement in the functionality of encryption techniques, authentication sessions, tunneling and traffic engineering. To these basic functionalities, we can add other features such as the support for Voice and Video applications over IPSec VPNs (Cisco Systems, 2002), or the possibility of configuring multi-point VPNs by dynamically adding and/or removing nodes.

Today it is possible to administer, from a single management point, the deployment and configuration of tens of thousands of VPNs, centrally administer the security policies for each user, and remotely set the configurations of the various hardware and software devices, making it also extremely simple and transparent to network users (Awad et al., 2013). All these are elements that describe the two main strands on which the further development of VPN technologies is also based: support for advanced converged networks (data, voice, video, storage on a single IP network infrastructure), and simplifying the implementation of such systems.